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Sunday, April 14, 2013

Bento Box Tools!

Hi! For Easter, (I didn't post on Easter because I was the one collecting eggs) I got TONS of awesome Japanese stuff from the Easter Bunny! They were all Bento related. What's a Bento? It's a Japanese lunch box, with food in the form of cute animals! All edible. I made a bento box once, and brought it to school and the kids went crazy! Here are some pictures from websites with Bento Boxes. (NOT MY CONTENT)

My Modern Met



Tumblr

Get it now? Originally, though, Bento Boxes are Japanese Cuisine arranged in separate sections in a box, but a popular version is above. This is a traditionally Bento.

Examiner

Ok, enough talk about Bento Box history, let's see what I got!

So, one of the things I got is a 'bento flower stack'. I don't know it's real name, but that's what I call it. This is what it looks like.


It's little cutters that cut out ham, cheese, salami, and anything else for your bento! For example, you choose the face/design and put ham up to it and cute it. Bento makers use these for faces (the penguin face) bodies (Yoshi's body) and emotions (Kirby's expression)! So, let's un-box it!

Oh my gosh! I didn't know it was three layers! Seriously, I though it was one. I gues that means triple the Bento awesomeness...
The three layers are: Orange,  (on top) Soft Yellow, (middle) and Red (bottom).

I think it's awesome that, on TOP of it being cute Bento material, they put it into flower shapes and cute colors! That was definitely a sales pitch I hit.

It ALSO came with a book for some How-To Bento faces!




That's the content of the book! So, today, I will be making this!
Since it's my first time doing this, I'm not sure it will turn out well...But everything is worth a try!

So, I got meat, basil, salami, and cheeses. I'm READY! So, first, I'm going to take my white cheese. Thats the face. The face figure is on the top flower. All you do is push down onto the cheese and it cuts out the face!

Wow! That works REALLY well. I definitely give the accuracy  of the cut a perfect score.
It's not much, but it's a start. Now, let's do the hair! I used Cheddar cheese for this, but you are rightfully supposed to use boiled carrots. It's both red hair, so who cares? So, for the hair, I also used the top flower. I need to parts; a cloud and bangs. The cloud betrays a tuft of hair, and the bangs, well... they're bangs.

So, so far, I have a head with hair, but no face. Like the headless horseman, but faceless.
Now the mouth and eyes. The mouth is made out of salami, the eyes, basil. We are using the face from the bottom flower. The salami mouth was WAY to big, so I cut it smaller. It's nor HARD, they should know the mouth shouldn't be bigger that the face!



The basil eyes were pretty hard to cut out. it had only made in imprint on the basil,so I had to use scissors to cut out the shape. But for the second eye I realized to just JAM that flower into the basil. I still had to lightly cut, but I found the second technique worked better. 


I'M DONE!! Wow, that took a long time, but a cute time, too. It's a fun experience, cutting out the cheese, arranging the hair. I might do a tutorial on how to make one without a pattern from the book guiding you. Without the book, it takes lots of creativity. I'm thinking making dents in the cheese hair so it looks like a braid. Anyways, this is the finished face!

 Do you think it matches to the pattern? Comment!